Windswept (24 page)

“Every time something bad has happened to me in the last few days, she’s been involved,” I said. “You guys get pinched by Saarien? She leads the march to his bus.”

“That’s because he had large, angry men with him.”

“When the WalWa goons caught that bus, she was there.”

“As a prisoner, with the rest of us.”

“When Jordan and her buddies showed up, she was the one who beat the crap out of them.”

Banks nodded. “OK, I’ll give you that.”

“Then you’ll give me what happened at Steelcase, too,” I said. “She’s a ship’s engineer, and part of engineering is understanding control layouts. She could have piloted that crane.”

“
And
shot at us at the same time?” said Banks. “
And
piloted the other cranes that were chasing us?”

“Maybe she got some local talent to help her out. There were a bunch of people in the burn room, and she was one of them,” I said. “I saw her face. One eye. Lots of scars. She
shot
at us. And she had help.”

“Whose?” said Banks. “WalWa’s?”

I nodded. “She’s a Ghost, Banks. Your friend is a WalWa Ghost.”

Banks shook his head. “Look, Ellie may get a little aggro, but there’s no way she could be a Ghost. I’ve been with her for four years.”

“But where was she before she came aboard?” I said.

Banks sighed. “As your attorney, I advise you to drop this before I have to get you committed.”

“Won’t work here,” I said. “All the shrinks are already crazy.”

“Ellie is not a Ghost.”

“Then how else do you explain how an armed assault team appeared out of nowhere?”

“I know this has been a really long, nasty day, but I give you my word that you did not see Ellie shooting at us.”

I stared at him, his face unwavering, and then I felt a tickle at the back of my head. What if he was right?
Of course he is
, hissed The Fear, raking its claws across my skull. “You don’t believe me? Then we’ll see what Soni and the police have to say when I get back within broadcast range. This all just got bigger and uglier, and if you want to be a part of the Union, you’re going to have to get behind us.”

“Because of your say-so?”

“Goddamn right.” I turned and pushed through the cane.

It was tough going through the tightly packed stalks, and it was that much worse when I felt something stick to my hands and face. At first, I thought it was actual sugar from broken shoots, but then I looked at my hands and saw they were coated in sticky, black residue. “What the hell is this?”

Jilly looked at my hands and spat. “This field’s done. Black stripe.”

“The fungus?” I said. “Can’t they just treat it?”

Jilly shook her head. “Not this kind. It showed up earlier this year, and it’s bad. Got my folks, my neighbors. Fungicides can’t stop it, and no one’s sure what the vector is.”

I wiped my hands on my clothes, only to see they were already coated with the black stripe. “Has it gotten into the heirloom yet?”

Jilly shrugged. “To a fungus, cane’s cane.”

The Fear laughed.
You and your friends in the Co-Op, you’ve been so worried about your precious rum, you never thought about what else was happening in the kampong. How many hectares look like this? How many that make your six o’clock tipple? It’s been under your nose the whole time, and you’ve been too self-involved to notice.

I stopped and looked back to where we’d come from. Jilly had hung on to two bags of shreds, and Banks was sure there would be enough in there to keep the police from thinking I’d murdered Saarien. The smart thing to do would be to pick them up, walk back toward Thronehill and its connectivity and wait for Soni to pick me up. I could clear my name, then get back to dealing with Ghosts and rotting cane and skunked rum…

I looked at the withering cane, the stalks streaked with black, like someone had sprayed the field with coal dust. I’d been in the kampong plenty of times, seen the occasional blighted fields from a rust or a smut or any of the other nasty fungal infections that hit cane. It was never as bad as this. And what if it didn’t stop with the rum? What if the same skunk weirdness was happened with all the industrial molasses we were sending up the cable? How many people would lose their shirts if their farms were ruined? Hell, what if this jumped to actual food? I could tell Soni later about WalWa’s possible nefarious deeds; first, I had to see what was happening to the cane. I followed Jilly and Banks deeper into the kampong.

After another hour of walking, we got to a break in the field. A dirt path ran off into darkness to the north, and toward a cluster of lights to the south. As we approached, I saw it was a transfer station, though it was deserted.

The four dilapidated warehouses were dark, and solar-cell-topped light poles dotted a gravel yard that glowed orange under their lamps. The whole place looked like a resort hotel that had fallen on hard times. Without a pai connection, I had no way to tell who owned the station or what plantations used it; we would just have to wait until morning to catch a ride.

“You think it’s safe?” said Banks as we huddled in the cane.

“I can do the talking for us,” said Jilly.

We jogged to the darkened warehouses. Bundles of cane were stacked two meters high outside each of them, and, as I peeked through windows, I saw the insides were packed to the rafters. “This is weird, though,” I said as we walked around the warehouses, trying doors. “Everything gets planted on the same cycles, and it’s not harvest time for a few weeks. Why are they leaving this lying around?”

“To age?” said Banks. “That’s just a guess.”

“And a bad one,” said Jilly. “Even with industrial stuff, the juice starts to go bad if it’s exposed for too long. Even gengineers can’t fight oxidation and win.”

“So what’s it doing here?”

“Who knows?” I pulled on the last door. Its hinges popped out of the rotting chipwood frame, and I stepped back as the door thudded to the ground. “But I don’t think anyone will care if we watch it for the night.”

Jilly and Banks slipped inside, Banks pulling the door back into the frame behind him as I looked around. Cord after cord of cut cane lay before us, all of it oozing sugar onto the dusty ground. The whole room was silent. “This place should be full of bugs and rats,” Jilly said. “Leaving this much cane around is like opening a buffet for vermin.”

“Even for industrial cane?”

“Sugar’s sugar if you’re starving,” I said, feeling my stomach growl. I gave the cane a sniff. It had the same oil-and-charcoal scent as the industrial varieties, but with something extra, like it was laced with chili powder and plastic. “Though I still have no idea what this is, and I’ve smelled or tasted every kind of cane that grows here.”

Jilly gave a stalk a lick, then made a face like she’d tasted a lemon. “Ugh, that’s horrible.”

“Maybe someone’s made a new kind,” said Banks.

“I think you’re right,” I said, doing some quick calculations in my head. “There has to be thirty thousand hectares of cane in this warehouse alone. If all of this is from the same plantation, they’re looking at serious jail time.”

“For breeding cane?”

“Didn’t you get to that part in the law books?” I said. “Anyone tries to make a new variety, they have to get it checked and registered to make sure it doesn’t interfere with the current crops.”

“I think I went for breakfast before I got to that part,” said Banks.

“Too bad,” I said, “’cause you would’ve gotten to the bit about how no one screws with this planet’s cash crop without jumping through all sorts of hoops. The money we get from cane keeps everyone fed. And if that went away, there would be blood in the streets.”

“Really?” said Banks. “Even with all the urban farming?”

“No one’s going to starve, but there’s no way anyone could afford Big Three goods,” I said. “This planet just doesn’t have the population to sustain that kind of high tech.”

We found tarps and folded them into makeshift tatami. Jilly conked out immediately. “You still have that flask?” asked Banks after he’d sat down.

I felt in my pockets, my fingers touching the cool coral steel container. I blinked up the time: ten on the nose. Eighteen hours to go. I wondered if a bit wouldn’t hurt, just enough to get me over until tomorrow, but I remembered Dr Ropata’s admonition to do the
whole
ritual, or nothing at all. He’d also said not to let more than two days go by without...

“Hey!” said Banks. “You still have it or what? I’m getting a little chilly.”

I shivered. “It won’t help,” I said. “Really, we shouldn’t have anything until we’re back home.”

“Is that why you’ve got a death grip on that flask?” said Banks, nodding to my pocket.

I looked down and saw my knuckles bulging through the fabric of my pants, felt the muscles in my fingers knotting themselves up. I let go of the flask and shook out my hand. “It’s not what you think.”

“I think there’s something you’re not telling me.”

“I
know
there’s a
lot
I’m not telling you,” I said, sitting down, my back to him. “Go to sleep, Banks. We have a weird day ahead of us.”

It was quiet for a few minutes. Then Banks said, “You never told us why you Breached.”

“Sleep,” I said.

More silence. Through the window, I watched clouds obscured the moon. One of the lamps blinked out, its battery out of charge. “It’s just,” said Banks, “I still don’t understand
why
you’d leave that gig in Colonial Management. I mean, the rest of us, we all got seriously screwed, but you?”

“Good night, Banks.”

“You know, I worked for a pair of certifiable psychotics,” said Banks. In the dim light, I could see him sit up, his legs crossed in front of him. He looked at the ground. “You have to be a bit mad to work in Legal for WalWa or any of the Big Three, but these two? They took joy in holding up big, important things that would have made people’s lives better. LiaoCon was testing a new anticancer treatment? They’d file injunctions because it might have violated some ancient WalWa patent. MacDonald Heavy has a new method for processing ricewheat that increases nutrition? Can’t have that, because it would interfere with WalWa’s Charitable Calorie Bank. And don’t get me started on the countersuits they filed when some poor consumer complained about the way their WalWa-brand toaster oven was actually a repackaged antipersonnel mine.”

I sighed and turned toward him. “I thought you did real estate.”

“I did everything,” said Banks. “I got bounced around from one group to the other, just so I could soak up the law by osmosis, I guess.”

“So, what, you got sick of doing their dirty work?”

“No,” said Banks, “I got sick of the pointlessness. I didn’t have any illusions about helping people when I became a lawyer, but I didn’t think the work would be so stupid. It did nothing to help WalWa’s bottom line, it did nothing to help our department because we wound up creating headaches for other parts of the company that would come back to haunt us. Hell, they even got different parts of WalWa to sue each other, just to cover up their own messes.”

“Then why didn’t you leave?” I said. “Transfer to another office, another planet.”

Banks shook his head. “Same thing that happened to Madolyn and Gricelda: they kept offering me more. ‘Just be lead counsel on this case, and you’ll get a raise.’ ‘Just file this injunction, and you’ll get an increased vacation allowance.’ ‘Just sue this orphanage, and we’ll knock a year off your Indenture.’”

“You sued an orphanage?”

Banks sighed. “It was a copyright issue, painting the walls with cartoon characters they thought were in the public domain. They didn’t know the Big Three had pretty much bought the public domain and sued the shit out of anyone who tried to challenge them. Anyway, that was the last straw. No matter what assignment they’d give me or however much time they were chipping away from my Indenture, it wasn’t worth it. I stowed away on an orbital shuttle, talked my way onto the
Rose
, and here I am.”

“Not quite the glamorous trip you’d expected?”

“I’d never been offworld until then, really,” he said. “I mean, yeah, I left home for law school, but WalWa was using schoolships, then, so the whole trip to the Red Line and back was classwork.”

“That would have been nice,” I said. “I might still be with WalWa if they’d bothered to keep us awake during transit.”

“Yeah?” said Banks. “You don’t do hibernation, either?”

“Oh, I was just fine during testing,” I said. “I wrapped up my Masters, did a month in a tank on the ground, and I passed with flying colors. No psych problems, no physical issues. If anything, I came out of it feeling better than I had in years. It was like I got to make up for all the sleep I lost during B-school and that Entertainment Logistics job.”

“So, what happened?”

I looked at Banks, his face smudged with mud and cane juice and God knows what, his smile still bright, and I realized that I hadn’t talked about this with anyone since Dr Ropata. Not Wash, not Soni, not Big Lily, and I felt the crushing weight of it all in the middle of my chest. I took a breath and said, “I don’t dream any more.”

Banks chuckled, then stopped when he saw the look on my face. “Um, sorry. I thought you were just being metaphorical.”

“No, I’m telling you what happened. It was that first ride as a fishstick that did it.” I swallowed, fighting back the chills as I thought about stripping naked but for a latex swim cap to keep my hair out of the way, and climbing into that sleeping bag with the cold foil lining. “The techs used a new batch of hibernant, a better variety than the kind we’d used in testing. And I was a company player, totally loyal to WalWa, and I had no problem being their guinea pig.

“They tore open a gold mylar pouch with twenty-two-oh-one stamped on its side – I can remember that number, clear as my birthday – and poured in this liquid that smelled like curry and stale orange juice. I got sleepier and colder until the hibernant was in my nose and throat and eyes and I was too tired to fight the choking and coughing, but not too tired to close my goddamned eyes. I felt completely powerless, and it was only made worse when they lowered the TV right in front of my face and turned on the Mickey Mouse cartoons that played for the duration of the trip.” I shook my head. “Two years out to the Red Line, a jump to Santee, then two years in to orbit.”